Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias

Author:Gabino Iglesias [Iglesias, Gabino]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Broken River Books
Published: 2018-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

THE MOTHER

Death. That was the only option. It was everywhere. Death took her husband. Death lived inside her. Death was coming out at night, preying on children throughout the town. The Mother had heard the rumors already. Parents finding their babies dead in their cradles, their tiny bodies devoured by some animal. Blood everywhere. Slithering trails of blood left on floors and windowsills. She felt responsible.

Did she have what it took to wait for the monster, to kill it? Maybe. Would she be able to? She didn’t know. The thing was an alien, a parasite, a monster, a nightmare made flesh, but it was still her baby. It was still the last thing that her husband had given her. A baby to take care of. Maybe that’s exactly what she needed. Maybe a brother was what The Boy needed to forget their bad luck, to keep him from realizing just how poor they were.

No. The thing inside her could not be allowed to continue living, to continue killing. She had to do something, and she had to do it soon.

The mere thought of action tired her. Thinking about the physical aspect of killing the sliding horror in her womb made her want to take a nap.

She was sitting on the small kitchen table. The Boy was outside. She could hear him in the distance, screaming and laughing with his friends, oblivious to the nightmare going on under his own roof, of the awful creature that was born every damn night in the same room where he slept.

The heat was oppressive. The Mother wanted a glass of cold water, but getting up from the table seemed impossible. She was too tired. And she was somehow becoming one with the table. That was impossible, but it was happening. It had been happening for a while. Her body would get stuck to things if she stayed in contact with them for too long. It took her a long time to pull her body free of the mattress every morning. If she sat on the toilet for too long, her skin would stick to the white surface. Whenever she sat at the kitchen table, her ass and elbows begged to remain glued to the chair and table.

She also felt her joints stiffening. This was something she wanted to attribute to the pregnancy, but couldn’t. It felt too wrong, too surreal. It had started a few days before, and now if she sat for too long, her knees would crack loudly when she finally stood up. It was painful. The idea of seeing a doctor crossed her mind, but she had no money and no insurance. And she didn’t want anyone to know about the thing she was carrying. What would they do if they knew the thing that had been killing and eating babies was her own…she couldn’t think of it as a child, but it definitely felt like hers.

Sitting at that table, the skin of her elbows and forearms almost unperceptively melting into the old, scratched wood, The Mother had a breakthrough.

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